How love be
November 28, 2021 6:04 PM Subscribe
Who's written really well about love (particularly from non-dominant perspectives)?
If love is not too earnest a topic, I'm looking for really good writers who have tackled the theory and practice of love—particularly from alternative angles.
I want to get a sense of all the different ways love feels. Things that have spoken intensely to you, I would put at the top of the list.
Because I'm a crazy reader, I would also love to see more work that focuses on any of these angles: queer (non-hetero), POC (in a Western sense), non-Western, friendship, collective (non-couple), non-monogamous, conflicted, long-term, political praxis, economic, ironic, intensely experiential, solo, ecological, or theoretical perspectives on love and desire. (Please, nothing about polyamory/swinging unless it's the only book you would take on a desert island.)
If it doesn't seem like it's about love to anyone but you, I would especially love to see it.
To give a sense of some readings already on my list:
* Against the Couple Form
* Uses of the Erotic
* "What if friendship, not marriage, was the center of life?" (Atlantic)
* The Agony of Eros
* Desire/Love
* Lost Cat (Gaitskill)
* The Politics of Friendship
All my love!
If love is not too earnest a topic, I'm looking for really good writers who have tackled the theory and practice of love—particularly from alternative angles.
I want to get a sense of all the different ways love feels. Things that have spoken intensely to you, I would put at the top of the list.
Because I'm a crazy reader, I would also love to see more work that focuses on any of these angles: queer (non-hetero), POC (in a Western sense), non-Western, friendship, collective (non-couple), non-monogamous, conflicted, long-term, political praxis, economic, ironic, intensely experiential, solo, ecological, or theoretical perspectives on love and desire. (Please, nothing about polyamory/swinging unless it's the only book you would take on a desert island.)
If it doesn't seem like it's about love to anyone but you, I would especially love to see it.
To give a sense of some readings already on my list:
* Against the Couple Form
* Uses of the Erotic
* "What if friendship, not marriage, was the center of life?" (Atlantic)
* The Agony of Eros
* Desire/Love
* Lost Cat (Gaitskill)
* The Politics of Friendship
All my love!
Maria Popova has a marvelous weekly newsletter, The Marginalian, in which she often publishes authors on the many varieties of love. https://www.themarginalian.org/?mc_cid=4da61b8017&mc_eid=4734d5ac23
posted by ragtimepiano at 6:46 PM on November 28, 2021
posted by ragtimepiano at 6:46 PM on November 28, 2021
Not even a decade old, but a classic all the same.
posted by shadygrove at 6:49 PM on November 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by shadygrove at 6:49 PM on November 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
Jeanette Winterson, particularly the novel Written on the Body, comes to mind as a sort of classic queer author who writes about the nature of love. Written on the Body is famous for a fragmented narrative and a narrator whose gender is never disclosed. I think that it is also often analyzed though a disabilities studies framework.
https://www.powells.com/book/written-on-the-body-9780679744474
Review of Written on the Body as best book of the year in 1993 from Granta Magazine
posted by forkisbetter at 6:56 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
https://www.powells.com/book/written-on-the-body-9780679744474
Review of Written on the Body as best book of the year in 1993 from Granta Magazine
posted by forkisbetter at 6:56 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
My favourite novel is Garth Greenwell's 'What Belongs To You'. It's the only book I've read that's talked about love the way I've felt it - as something simultaneously total and slightly embarrassing, a shame full of kindness.
It's maybe the best-written book I've ever read. It's absolutely the one that's felt truest.
(It ticks a lot of your boxes, too - "non-dominant" in more ways than one - though the strangest thing for me was how completely I related, as someone who essentially doesn't.)
posted by wattle at 7:50 PM on November 28, 2021
It's maybe the best-written book I've ever read. It's absolutely the one that's felt truest.
(It ticks a lot of your boxes, too - "non-dominant" in more ways than one - though the strangest thing for me was how completely I related, as someone who essentially doesn't.)
posted by wattle at 7:50 PM on November 28, 2021
You are looking for bell hooks.
posted by Beethoven's Sith at 9:07 PM on November 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by Beethoven's Sith at 9:07 PM on November 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
Carrie Jenkins, a queer poly philosopher, wrote a book called What Love Is and What It Could Be that I think is very interesting.
posted by congen at 11:31 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by congen at 11:31 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
A Defense of Masochism by Anita Phillips.
This may not seem to be about love to people who can't understand how a power exchange could be erotic (especially in a world where many would say male dominance and female submission is already an everyday fact of the patriarchy), but she's very explicit about the intimacy it brings. Definitely comes from the "non-dominant perspective" that you're looking for.
An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin doesn't fit your criteria in some respects; it's about how people, primarily French women, "escape from loneliness, fear and aimlessness, find new forms of affection and adventure, can avoid being prisoners of their memories or mistakes". But to me it is ultimately about love, and even if you find it doesn't cover the topic you want, I promise you'll read it and re-read it.
posted by underclocked at 11:45 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
This may not seem to be about love to people who can't understand how a power exchange could be erotic (especially in a world where many would say male dominance and female submission is already an everyday fact of the patriarchy), but she's very explicit about the intimacy it brings. Definitely comes from the "non-dominant perspective" that you're looking for.
An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin doesn't fit your criteria in some respects; it's about how people, primarily French women, "escape from loneliness, fear and aimlessness, find new forms of affection and adventure, can avoid being prisoners of their memories or mistakes". But to me it is ultimately about love, and even if you find it doesn't cover the topic you want, I promise you'll read it and re-read it.
posted by underclocked at 11:45 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is a different angle from your seed list of suggestions, so it may not be helpful. But here are some books I teach in an English literature class about the history of ideas about love in the Western/European tradition:
Sappho, Poems and Fragments (Anne Carson translation)
Plato, Symposium
Ovid, Dido to Aeneas
Dante, La Vita Nuova
Boccaccio, Decameron
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk and Giovanni's Room
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
If I could assign infinite reading I would also love to read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past with my students.
posted by sy at 12:03 AM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
Sappho, Poems and Fragments (Anne Carson translation)
Plato, Symposium
Ovid, Dido to Aeneas
Dante, La Vita Nuova
Boccaccio, Decameron
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk and Giovanni's Room
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
If I could assign infinite reading I would also love to read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past with my students.
posted by sy at 12:03 AM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
Oh, I forgot a recent work of sociology about modern love and capitalism: Cold Intimacies, by Eva Illouz.
posted by sy at 12:43 AM on November 29, 2021
posted by sy at 12:43 AM on November 29, 2021
Non-Western: Love Songs of Arnhem Land are Yolngu sexual romance / erotic songs collected by ethnomusicologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt in 1946-1947.
Book reviewer, Lorraine says:
Chapter list here.
posted by Thella at 2:03 AM on November 29, 2021
Book reviewer, Lorraine says:
Berndt safely navigates the dangers faced by ethnographers so well captured by Nigel Barley in his book, The Innocent Anthropologist, of respectfully describing traditional cultural practices of deflowering young girls, which from Western and human rights value systems would be violations and the criminal law and human rights, only once in the introduction, describing them as "distasteful". This is an important volume for understanding Aboriginal ethnography and Arnhem Land traditional culture.I can't tell from that review whether Berndt's 'distasteful' comment is considered adequate or inadequate.
Chapter list here.
posted by Thella at 2:03 AM on November 29, 2021
bell hooks, All About Love
posted by eviemath at 3:11 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by eviemath at 3:11 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
Folks more knowledgeable than I might add works not in English. The only such I can suggest is Beaudelaire.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:42 AM on November 29, 2021
posted by SemiSalt at 5:42 AM on November 29, 2021
Rebecca Solnit's essay "The Mother of All Questions" isn't primarily focused on this particular issue, but does spend some of its time on the question of the "other work love has to do in the world" that isn't the normative idea of love in a way that I found meaningful and helpful.
posted by Stacey at 6:45 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Stacey at 6:45 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
Jane Rule writes about love and community in understated but radical ways. Queerness and disability are central to her work. Most of it is out of print, but relatively available used.
posted by dizziest at 8:41 AM on November 29, 2021
posted by dizziest at 8:41 AM on November 29, 2021
To cover your ecological angle: Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) explores in Braiding Sweetgrass how many definitions of love can apply to our relationship with nature.
posted by oxisos at 10:44 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by oxisos at 10:44 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
James Baldwin's Another Country is one of my all-time favorite books, and deals with love, lust, intimacy, friendship, interracial couples, affairs, etc.
Another all-time favorite, and the ultimate book about long term love/longing is Love in the Time of Cholera, which seems more prescient than ever given the year we've all just had...
posted by sleepingwithcats at 11:34 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
Another all-time favorite, and the ultimate book about long term love/longing is Love in the Time of Cholera, which seems more prescient than ever given the year we've all just had...
posted by sleepingwithcats at 11:34 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, Jessica Benjamin
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:21 PM on November 29, 2021
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:21 PM on November 29, 2021
How about a 900-page fantasy novel?
The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard is about a lot of things but I’d say love in all its forms (mainly not romantic) is the main thing.
If you’d like to read a review of it by someone with absolutely no chill, here you go.
posted by exceptinsects at 10:49 PM on December 2, 2021
The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard is about a lot of things but I’d say love in all its forms (mainly not romantic) is the main thing.
If you’d like to read a review of it by someone with absolutely no chill, here you go.
posted by exceptinsects at 10:49 PM on December 2, 2021
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posted by Wobbuffet at 6:23 PM on November 28, 2021 [2 favorites]